Get Ready for Google AdWords’ Spring Cleaning

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Spring is just around the corner and you know what that means: it’s time to do a little reorganizing and clean out some junk! While the thought of cleaning makes some people want to run and hide, that shouldn’t be the case when it comes to this new Google AdWords update.

It was announced that during the week of March 23rd, 2015, Google will delete any ads that have never accrued an impression (i.e. nobody saw the ad) and have been removed from user accounts for more than 100 days. Once these ads and campaigns have been deleted, they will no longer be accessible or viewable. If you are feeling some sort of panic at the permanence of this update, there’s no need to worry. Given their ineffectiveness and the length of time they have gone untouched, it is clear that these entities are not useful to your business. The aim is to get rid of the accumulated clutter in order to try and speed up your AdWords experience. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy a faster, more improved experience? We’re wondering why this update wasn’t implemented earlier!

To take it a step further, later on this year, Google will also clean up unused ad groups and campaigns while considering the same criteria mentioned above. As an example, let’s say that you have created a Google Ad to get more traffic to your company’s website. After a week of it being active, you notice that it did not leave any impressions . That’s when you decide to remove it and start over from scratch. One hundred days later, you notice that the removed ad is still visible in your account history which could be slowing down your AdWords experience. However, once this new change is applied, your account will be cleaned up, freeing it from ineffective ads. This may not be as important for businesses that have only created a few ads, but for those that have a robust Google AdWords campaign, it can certainly have a significant impact.

In addition to reducing the number of inactive ads, a change will be made to the historical data and reporting of your removed campaigns and ad groups. This will also be implemented later on in the year, but users will be notified well in advance. Once you remove a campaign or group they will be unrecoverable and unchangeable, which is already the case for removed ads. To work around this, if there are removed campaigns that you would potentially like to activate in the future, change their status to “paused” instead of removing them. Just make sure that everyone on your team is aware of this!

So there you have it! That’s the gist of the upcoming clean up to your Google AdWords account. Will you welcome this change?